Ralph Rumney, Artist and Avant-Gardist, Dies at 67
Hyfler/Rosner
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
(NY Times)
Ralph Rumney, an English-born artist who romanced just about every
eccentric left-wing intellectual movement he encountered over a
half-century - and helped start a few - died on March 6 at his home in
Manosque in the Provence region of France. He was 67.
The cause was cancer, the news agency Agence France-Presse reported.
Mr. Rumney founded no philosophical schools, nor did the art he produced so
voluminously bear any important influence. But he displayed an uncanny knack
for finding himself where intellectual cauldrons were bubbling, and tossing
in some memorably zestful spice.
In 1957, Mr. Rumney was a founding member of the Situationist International,
a movement that mixed Surrealism, Marxism and sometimes spectacular hedonism
and that has been described as the spiritual precursor to the Paris riots of
1968, the Sex Pistols and the sensationalist art of people like Damien
Hirst. The tiny movement has remained a subject of fascination in France,
where books on it appear regularly.
Within months of the group's formation, at a weeklong meeting in a bar in
Italy, Mr. Rumney was the first member to be expelled by the group's leader,
Guy Debord, who had a penchant for excommunication. Forty-five of the 70
members were eventually expelled.
But Mr. Rumney kept the faith and as late as 2000 called together
Situationists and their fellow travelers from five countries for a month of
drinking and debating in Manosque.
"Ralph is a hero," said Michel Guet, leader of the Banalistes, a group of
avant-garde artists, at the conclave. "He has refused to concede that the
dreams of the old avant-gardes are finished. That is why artists will build
monuments to him in the 21st century."
The central belief of the Situationists, aside from the frequent denial that
they had any beliefs at all, was that people were no longer participants in
their own lives, but spectators. Reality, they said, was being replaced by
images in what they called the "spectacular society."
The situationists rejected art as an ornament of privilege and a commodity
for consumption. Mr. Rumney agreed with his cohorts, and saw his finished
art as a necessarily muddled reflection of his initial idea. But that
somehow did not stop him from producing a vast outpouring of art over the
years, from informal abstracts to large canvases using gold and silver leaf
to plaster sculptures to Polaroid pictures and videos.
One of his paintings hangs in the Tate Gallery in London, and he sold his
work at shows, but he refused to take art completely seriously. He also
insisted that no art could be truly original.
"The greatest plagiarist of all-time was Picasso, who if he saw a good idea
somewhere just took it and made it his own, in a flagrant manner," Mr.
Rumney said in a book of interviews compiled by Alan Woods ("The Map Is Not
the Territory," Manchester University Press, 2000).
He was born on June 5, 1934, in Newcastle, where his father was an Anglican
vicar. Anti-Establishment from the start, he was called a pervert by the
Bishop of Leeds for ordering the complete works of the Marquis de Sade while
still a schoolboy, according to an article in The Times of London in 2001.
He attended boarding school, turned down a chance to attend Oxford, and
dropped out of art school. He was expelled from the Young Communists for
lack of moral rectitude.
When he became a draft dodger, he fled to Paris, where he fell in with the
Lettrists, a radical group led by Mr. Debord. He painted, but came to
believe, with the Lettrists, that an artist does not have to make art; he
himself never stopped, however. He returned to London, where he started a
short-lived literary magazine, Other Voices.
In 1957, he met the art collector Peggy Guggenheim at a show of his work in
London, which led to an introduction to her daughter, Pegeen. He was so
taken with her that he gave her the painting her mother had wanted to buy,
"The Change," which now hangs in the Tate. They married a few years later.
Later in 1957, the Situationist International was formed in a bar in the
Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia. It combined the Lettrists with two
other minuscule groups, one of them the London Psychogeographical
Association, of which Mr. Rumney was the only member.
His first and last assignment was to provide a report on the psychic
geography of Venice. He proposed dyeing the Venice Lagoon a bright color. He
said this would serve two purposes: to see how people reacted, and to study
the flow and stagnation of the water.
He never dyed the canal (though in the riotous year of 1968, someone else
dyed it a bright green as a protest against capitalism) and he
procrastinated on the written report he had promised. An exasperated Mr.
Debord, who wanted to publish the document in an otherwise completed
collection, exiled him.
In 1967, Pegeen Guggenheim committed suicide in the couple's 17th-century
house on the Īle St. Louis, a tiny island in the River Seine in Paris. He is
survived by their son, Sandro.
In 1974, he married Mr. Debord's former wife, Michčle Bernstein, despite Mr.
Debord's disapproval. They later divorced.
After a lifetime of shuttling from London to Paris to Milan to Venice to the
tiny island of Linosa, south of Sicily, he finally settled in the south of
France. His small celebrity flickered anew when his autobiography, "Le
Consul," appeared in French in 1999. An English translation is planned for
this year by City Lights Publishers.
He seemed never to lose his zeal for the avant-garde, even as he claimed not
to believe in it.
"We were fanatics," he said last year in a Times of London interview, "but
we weren't wrong."